Here are The World Editors Forum's top 5 ideas from the WAN conference.

1. From the presentation 'Newspapers Need R&D' given by Mike Smith, managing director of Media Management Center in the US. Smith asserted that newspapers must invest more in research and development.

He said if one were to use a 'benchmark' of spending 2.6 percent of company revenue on research and development, "Gannett would have 192 million dollars to invest. The Tribune Company would have 148 million, The New York Times, 85 million, Knight Ridder, 78 million."

Smith gave the following example of how a newspaper tried an interesting research experiment.

The Danville Register & Bee gave its distribution department the opportunity to put together the paper's front page. Then, both the editorial and distribution departments' copies of the paper were offered for sale. The distribution department version had better sales.

Smith outlined the importance of this example in the following way: "Both groups said that their appreciation for the role of the other grew ... We need to reach across the line for expertise with experiments like this."

2. An interesting initiative to be launched by French newspaper La Dépêche du Midi in a bid to, in the words of marketing director Bruno Pachent, "get the reader into the newspaper".

The paper plans to organize conferences and workshops where subscribers can participate in person or remotely, through their interactive service. This service would also let readers send in video "letters to the editor", which would then be published in the paper with a photo. Mr. Pachent calls this the "virtual 'man in the street' interview."

3. Suggestions made by Jim Chisholm, WAN Strategy Advisor, in his presentation 'Harnessing the Interactive Generation'.

Chisholm made the following comments about citizen journalism: "The world is full of millions ... of people who want to do our job for us, and publish stories on their own ... Production editors no longer have staffs of 50 -- they have a staff of 50,000. The problem is, nobody knows what is good among all that ... we have to be better than Google and the other aggregators at developing the tools to determine what is valuable."

Significantly, Chisholm outlined the important steps newspapers must make in moving towards more effective interaction with their readers: "We have maximize contact with our readers ... we have to go
from the concept of being a single printed medium to being a club, where people participate."  

4. The comments of Gianluca Bovoli, partner director at Italian consultancy group Innovation, who spoke about the lessons learned from compiling the report 'Capturing and Captivating Young Readers: 50 Editorial Strategies'. 

Bovoli makes the overall conclusion that "it is counterproductive to put young readers in a "ghetto" of special pages inserted in the paper". Rather, the strategy should be to create 'more youthful' newspapers. He then provides a number of examples of how to achieve such a goal, such as: "good design, yes, but content first; expand opinion pages for the young; promote print on-line; show the reader in the newspaper every day."

5. The presentation of Jasna Zemijic, CEO of seven month old Croatian paper 24 sata (24 Hours), and Thomas Dobernigg, director at Dobernigg & Rupprecht Kommunikation, who helped develop the new paper.  

Since its launch, 24 sata has become the third largest paper in Croatia. The paper is designed to appeal to young readers. It is A4 size and has lots of small photos and small blocks of text. Dobernigg explains that the idea behind the paper is to make it as much like the internet as possible, saying: "I wanted it to be as diverse as the internet, as visual as television. It is like you would see on the internet, small units, small boxes of information."

Source: WAN here, here and here